Saturday, 31 December 2016

By Helen PuckroseI don’t remember ever not being a feminist.
I toddled in marches of the 1970s with my mother. She became a second
wave feminist in the 1960s after being denied a mortgage without a male
guarantor and being told by her employer that she could not study for
accountancy exams because “There’s no accounting for women.” Briefly
flirting with radical feminism, she found their views extreme and
unreasonable and was berated for her heterosexual relationships and love
of feminine clothing (see her poem “Woman the Barricades“).
She found her home in liberal feminism and from there was active in
writing, marching and protesting for legal changes which would give her
the same opportunities as men. By the late 1980s, she felt the main
legal battles had been won, and largely retired from active campaigning
though she continues to identify as a feminist and study women’s
history.

Given this influence, of course I was a feminist, a liberal feminist.
Growing up, I spoke angrily about the legality of rape within marriage
(criminalized in 1990), and won a personal battle to take woodwork at
school rather than cookery (I was terrible at it but not noticeably
worse than I am at cooking). I criticized sexist attitudes at work,
which were still quite unapologetic in the 90s, informing my boss that
he was a “good boy” when he called me a “good girl” and refusing to say
anything apart from “cheep” to any man who referred to me as a “bird.”
Liberal feminism was aggressive then, but a quite different quality of
aggression to the spiteful malevolence we see now. It was optimistic,
almost playful. We were confident that we were winning. It was fun
seeing how we could disconcert the perpetrators of sexist stereotypes
and challenge casual sexism, often humorously. We did not think older
men (or women) with sexist assumptions were terrible people or want them
punished. We simply wanted them to realize the times had changed and
catch up. Women are everywhere now. Get used to it.

At times, we needed to work with the radical feminists. Rape victims
were still being dismissed or disbelieved. People still blamed victims
for their clothing quite respectably. This needed to become routinely
frowned upon. RadFems, who insisted that patriarchy was evident in
everything, that the idea of gender needed to be destroyed and that men
as a whole were dangerous and violent, were regarded as the biggest
internal problem the movement had to contend with by liberal feminists.
Mostly, their extreme input into feminist discussion was met with
eye-rolling and “Perhaps we don’t need to go quite that far.” We were
unprepared for the problem rising in our own liberal branch.
From the 1980s, some internal criticisms of liberal feminism began to
be made. Liberal feminism as a whole was charged with not recognizing
the additional problems faced by black and Asian women and lesbians, and
being largely centered on middle-class problems. These were valid
criticisms which needed addressing and prioritizing. All women must have
equality. Many liberal feminists began to dedicate more time to LGBT
rights and highlight the particular vulnerability of women living in
communities which adhered to oppressive patriarchal religion,
particularly Islam, and subjected women and girls to “honor” violence
and genital mutilation. They did this within universal liberal feminism
and some still do but in this decade, the academic shift in the
humanities and social sciences towards postmodernism began, and
gradually filtered through to feminism in praxis. Intersectionality was
forming.

People are often confused about what postmodernism is and what it has
to do with feminism. Very simplistically, it was an academic shift
pioneered by Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard which denied
that reliable knowledge could ever be attained and claimed that meaning
and reality themselves had broken down. It rejected large, overarching
explanations (meta-narratives) which included religion but also science,
and replaced them with subjective, relative accounts (mini-narratives)
of the experiences of an individual or sub-cultural group. These ideas
gained great currency in the humanities and social sciences and so
became both an artistic movement and a social “theory.” They rejected
the values of universal liberalism, the methods of science and the use
of reason and critical thinking as the way to determine truth and form
ethics. Individuals could now have not only their own moral truths but
their own epistemological ones. The expression “It’s true for me”
encapsulates the ethos of postmodernism. To claim to know anything to be
objectively true (no matter how well-evidenced) is to assert a
meta-narrative and to “disrespect” the contrary views of others which is
oppressive (even if those views are clearly nonsense.) The word
“scientism” was created for the view that evidence and testing are the
best way to establish truths.

At its height, postmodernism as an artistic movement produced
non-chronological, plotless literature and presented urinals as art. In
social theory, postmodernists “deconstructed” everything considered true
and presented all as meaningless. However, having done this, there was
nowhere else to go and nothing more to say. In the realm of social
justice, nothing can be accomplished unless we accept that certain
people in a certain place experience certain disadvantages. For this, a
system of reality needs to exist, and so new theories of gender and race
and sexuality began to emerge comprised of mini-narratives. These
categories were held to be culturally constructed and constructed
hierarchically to the detriment of women, people of color and LGBTs.
Identity was paramount.

Liberal feminist aims gradually shifted from the position:

“Everyone deserves human rights and equality, and feminism focuses on achieving them for women.”

to

“Individuals and groups of all sexes, races, religions and
sexualities have their own truths, norms and values. All truths,
cultural norms and moral values are equal. Those of white, Western,
heterosexual men have unfairly dominated in the past so now they and all
their ideas must be set aside for marginalized groups.”

Liberal feminism had shifted from the universality of equal human
rights to identity politics. No longer were ideas valued on their merit
but on the identity of the speaker and this was multifaceted,
incorporating sex, gender identity, race, religion, sexuality and
physical ability. The value of an identity in social justice terms is
dependent on its degree of marginalization, and these stack up and vie
for primacy. This is where liberal feminism went so badly wrong. When
postcolonial guilt fought with feminism, feminism lost. When it fought
with LGBT rights, they lost too.

So aware of Western imperialism having trampled on other cultures
historically, Western liberal feminism now embraced their most
patriarchal aspects. A Western liberal feminist can, on the same day,
take part in a slut walk to protest Western women being judged by their
clothing and accuse anyone criticizing the niqab of Islamophobia. She
can demand the prosecution of a Christian baker for refusing to bake a
wedding cake for a same sex-couple, and condemn the planning of a Gay
Pride march through a heavily Muslim area as racist. Many intersectional
feminists do not limit themselves to the criticism of other white,
Western feminists but pour vitriolic, racist abuse on liberal Muslim and
ex-Muslim feminists and LGBT activists. The misogyny and homophobia of
Christianity may be criticized by all (quite rightly) but the misogyny
and homophobia of Islam by none, not even Muslims. The right to
criticize one’s own culture and religion is seemingly restricted to
white westerners (The best analysis of “The Racism of Some Anti-racists” is by Tom Owolade).

Universal liberal feminists were horrified by this development. Our
old adversaries, the radical feminists, looked positively rational in
comparison. They might tell us we are culturally conditioned into
internalized misogyny, and they certainly had a pessimistic and paranoid
worldview but at least it was coherent. The intersectional feminists
were not even internally consistent. In addition to the cultural
relativity, the rules change day by day as new sins against social
justice are invented. We opposed the radical feminists for their extreme
antipathy towards men but at least they shared a bond of sisterhood
with each other. The intersectional feminists not only exhibit great
prejudice against men but also turn on each other at the slightest
imagined infraction of the rules. Having not the slightest regard for
reason or evidence, they vilify and harass those imagined to have
transgressed.

In addition to their failure to support the most vulnerable women in
society, intersectional feminism cultivated a culture of victimhood,
negatively impacting all women in society but particularly young women.
Women are oppressed, we are told, by men explaining anything, spreading
their legs on a train and committing vague sins like “expecting unequal
amounts of emotional labour.” If they call out to us or proposition us,
we should be terrified. If obnoxious men attempt to grope us or succeed,
we have experienced an appalling sexual assault from which we may never
recover. Not only are we oppressed by seemingly all men but by anyone
expressing anti-feminist ideas or feminist ones we don’t like. More than
this, we are rendered “unsafe” by them, particularly those women who
are trans and may have to hear that a trans exclusionary radical
feminist has said something in a place they don’t have to go to. It is
hard to imagine how women manage to survive leaving the house at all.

Even in the house, we cannot be entirely sure of “safety.” Men might
say mean things to us on the internet, and we couldn’t possibly cope
with that. In reality, I find the opposite problem more concerning.
Recently, in a disagreement with an intersectional feminist man, he
began to change his mind! Much encouraged, I continued the discussion.
After some time, I checked his bio and spotted that he was carrying on a
parallel conversation with another man in which he was expressing
exactly the same views he had since changed in our conversation.
Challenging him on this, I was informed that he did not feel he should
disrespect my lived experience as a woman by contradicting it with his
own views as a man. However, he still disagreed with me and felt able to
say so to another man. I could not get him to see that all this had
achieved was excluding me from the conversation and wasting my time. I
might as well have been made to withdraw to the drawing room to let the
men talk.

Perhaps men might criticize our academic writing or blogs? Richard
Dawkins was accused of misogyny for mocking a postmodernist sociology
essay that happened to have been written by a woman (He’d mocked one
written by a man a few days earlier). He was asked, by numerous people,
why he hated intelligent women or why he had to criticize women’s
writing? Surely, it should be clear to everyone that not doing so
excludes women from academic discussion? If we want to be taken
seriously as academics (or as bloggers), we need people to be able to
criticize our work.

Like many universal liberal feminists of my generation and above, I
decided to hang on and try to tackle, from the inside, the problems of
cultural relativity, science denial, raging incivility and the
disempowerment of women by feminists. This resulted in my being blocked
by feminists, told I am not a feminist, called an “anti-feminist,” a
“MRA,” a “misogynist” and even a “rape apologist” (I had suggested that
the men who invented date-rape drug detecting nail polish were
well-intentioned). I have been told to fuck myself with a rusty
chainsaw, and that I am a confused middle-aged woman who does not
understand society. Following one encounter with a feminist in which I
said I did not get death and rape threats from men, a new account with a
male name was suddenly set up which began sending me some.

At the same time, non-feminists were telling me that I was not what
they understood by “feminist” or even asserting that I was not a
feminist. I assured them I was because I was concerned about female
genital mutilation, “honor” violence and forced marriage affecting
British women today and rarely prosecuted. I am opposed to the
disempowerment of young women who are being told that they cannot cope
with different ideas and that criticism is abusive by feminists in
universities and schools. Are these not pressing issues affecting women?
My friend, Kath, a recovering RadFem, helped clarify my thoughts on
this.

This is true. I agree with Ayaan Hirsi Ali that western feminism
needs to stop focusing on “trivial bullshit.” I don’t have a huge amount
of sympathy for women who feel traumatized and excluded by scientists’
shirts or video games. When it comes to the little things, the playing
field becomes much more even. We all have gendered expectations we’d
rather not comply with. I suggest not doing it. There is very little
point in complaining about gender expectations whilst perpetuating them.
The idea that women cannot defy such expectations because of fear of
disapproval seems contrary to the entire ethos of feminist activism and
those who have gone before us.

I think it’s time I accepted that “feminism” no longer means “the aim
for equal rights for women” but is understood to refer to the current
feminist movement which encompasses so much more and very little that I
want to be associated with. I posted this on Twitter recently:

The serious issues faced by British women that I want to be involved
in are encompassed by human rights activism, and the disempowerment of
young women can only be opposed, sadly, by opposing feminism itself.

I used to be pleased when people told me that I had made them think
more positively about feminism, but now I fear that this may simply have
prevented that person from criticizing a movement that really needs to
be criticized. Feminism has lost its way and should not have public
respectability until it remedies this. It seems that more and more
people are realizing this. A recent study showed that only 7% of Brits identify as feminist
although over two thirds support gender equality. My sadness at
abandoning the identity bequeathed to me by my mother is mixed with
anger when I consider that she too, a woman who was instrumental in
getting banking qualifications opened to women, would now be regarded as
deeply problematic.

—————————Helen Pluckrose is a researcher in the humanities who
focuses on late medieval/early modern religious writing for and about
women. She is critical of postmodernism and cultural constructivism
which she sees as currently dominating the humanities. You can connect
with her on Twitter@HPluckrose
—————————

Sunday, 27 November 2016

Internationally renowned American social critic Camille Paglia has been
called ‘the anti-feminist feminist’. Describing contemporary feminism as
a ‘gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture’,
she stands firmly on the side of free speech and against political
correctness.

Camille Paglia sits down with Institute of Ideas director
Claire Fox and a full house, to discuss the past, present and future of
feminism and the themes in her forthcoming (and seventh) book, Free
Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism. In the riveting discussion which
ensues, filmed at the Battle of Ideas, Camille describes her thinking
as “street smart Amazon feminism”.

Asked about consent classes, she says
of those who run them “they are vampires, young people must rebel and
say get out of our sex lives.” Feminism as Claire Fox tells us,
certainly gets a good intellectual kicking. A must to watch and share.

Sunday, 26 June 2016

My two favourite feminists break down gamergate, intersectional feminism, the "male gaze", and lots more. I always say, if even 30% of modern feminists were capable of thinking like Based Mom and Based Goddess, I'd still be one.

Thursday, 28 April 2016

Purple Rain sold the most, and Sign ‘O’ The Times is widely considered his greatest artistic achievement but for my money, Parade is Prince’s most perfect album.

After the hard rock of Purple Rain and the 60s psychedelica of Around The World In A Day, Parade
returned to the robotic funk of his roots but with a palette of exotic
orchestrations and a new skinny, honking horn sound on tracks like
‘Girls & Boys’ and ‘New Position’ that seemed to hark back to the
1930s as much as the black and white movie he directed, Under The Cherry Moon, which these songs were ostensibly a ‘soundtrack’ to. Like Hemingway,
Prince’s great secret was his discovery that taking things out made what
you left in all the more powerful, and tracks like ‘I Wonder U’ are
barely there at all, and all the better for it.

It’s easy to
forget but Parade is essentially Prince’s only great ‘concept’ album, in
that it begins with a parade for ‘Christopher Tracy’ - his character in
the movie - and ends with a song mourning that fictional character's death.
And every song along the way is perfectly formed and seamlessly slides into the one
beside
it like threads in a Persian tapestry, most triumphantly at the point
‘Life Can Be So Nice’ kicks in.
The great songs for me are, obviously, Kiss, but equally Girls & Boys, the soaring, immortal ‘Mountains’ and his most paradoxically
heartfelt ballad, ‘Sometimes It Snows In April’. But, probably more than
any other of his albums, this one needs to be heard in its entirety
every time.

-

As an afterword, I really have to add a
youtube video isn’t the best way to hear any of these records, and
should be used only as an low-res sampler for you to get a hard copy of
the real thing, ideally on vinyl, at least until a decent remaster comes
along.

This
was the strangest of Prince’s imperial phase of 80s records, a swirling
psychedelic extravagance completely out of step with everything else
going on that decade, and as the follow-up to the phenomenally
successful Purple Rain album, its indulgences confounded most listeners
who judged it a failure and so it sold far less, even though it contains
the immortal ‘Raspberry Beret’ and the lesser known but equally perfect
‘Pop Life’.

But its inability to be categorized is precisely why this album is so great: What ‘kind’ of music is ‘Around The World in a Day’? What ‘kind’ of music is ‘The Ladder’? or ‘Temptation’? Or ‘Condition Of The Heart’?

That last song is the one I always used to sit people down with and
ask, with all the surging orchestra of sounds, all speeding up and
slowing down, coming in and going out - and all played by him (with the
exception of the finger cymbals, if I remember correctly)… which instrument did he play first?
I finally figured out years later by process of deduction it had to
have been the piano, but that doesn’t make it any less inexplicable or
extraordinary.

I saw a nice video today where black writer
Marc Bernardin
made the insightful statement that growing up in the 80s Prince was to
black kids what Bowie in the 70s was to white kids, and that’s so true:
At a time when being a black man on MTV meant you were either Luther
Vandross or Run DMC - both very narrow and confining models of
masculinity - Prince was as much The Beatles and Liberace and Joni
Mitchell as he was James Brown and Funkadelic. Prince alone demonstrated
you didn’t have to be anyone but yourself, that you could dream up the
life you wanted to live and the person you wanted to be and make it
real.

Not ideal sound quality but good enough for the genius to shine
through.

For the uninitiated saplings wondering what all the fuss is
about, my recommended cuts are first of all Sign O The Times itself and
then the run of If I Was Your Girlfriend, Strange Relationship and I
Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man, which no-one ever talks about
but for my money has his best ever guitar work - yes Purple Rain is a
better solo but the strange, winding odyssey he goes on before coming
back to the hook at the end is so detailed and sublime, and even more
extraordinary when you remember that’s him sat behind the drum kit,
that’s him playing bass, that’s him singing backup, that all of this was
dreamt up and brought forth in real time by a solitary human being
without a computer.

Unlike the other great pop stars of the
80s, Michael Jackson and Madonna, who never played a note on their
records - or even Springsteen, who played guitar and wrote the songs but
was at the mercy of his band as to how they ended up - every
instrument, every note, every harmony, every brush stroke along the way
was all played by one man, a painter at his easel, alone in a room with
his boundless imagination, 30 years ago. Nothing ever sounded like this
before. Or, let's be honest, since.

Thursday, 21 April 2016

This is nothing new or profound, of course - we're all dying - but there's just been so god-damned much of it lately. It's just left me kind of numb, but still wanting to offer up some words to the universe of what this man meant to me, to bear witness to what he made of worth in the time he was here. Today. On the day he died.

So here goes. Here's what Prince Rogers Nelson meant to me.

Between 1980 to 1987, Prince was simply a god, a mysterious, divine being creating impossible and unfathomably great music that I've only ever been able to describe as "a spaceship coming into land atop the great pyramid in ancient Egypt carrying James Brown, Jimi Hendrix and Bootsy Collins jamming away on alien technology while everyone below peaks on Ayahuasca". I'll stand by that.

And, of course, it goes without saying, he did almost all of it completely by himself. He played almost every instrument, sang almost every harmony, produced arranged composed and performed the lot. This is long before laptops and ProTools: no other rock star was doing this in the 1980s. No other rock star ever did that before.

Prince in later years would fitfully make some very nice pop songs here and there but he was never truly great like that ever again. And I've spent a lot of hours over the years trying to figure out why that was, at what precise point he lost hold of the holy grail. I once even begun writing a
short story about it, about that moment, which I placed sometime in 1988, when walking around his mansion looking out at the snow falling around his perimeter fence he
just said 'fuck it, I've done enough'. I doubt very much I'll ever
finish it now. It was going to be called 'Winter In Minneapolis'.

Part of me wishes he'd just walked away at that point, and lived a silent recluse like
Garbo. It's too much to ask, of course, but it would have been so
perfect, and left so little explaining to do. Life is perfect only in brief moments, it seems. Never lifetimes.

After a long dark night of the soul, never explained, between 'The Black Album' and 'Lovesexy' he lostthe dark, chilling obsession that drove his greatest work. He could never do confessional - too vain and calculating - and the lyrics of his songs were seldom as profound as he wanted to think they were, but in songs like 'Something In The Water', 'Automatic', 'If I Was Your Girlfriend', 'Darling Nikki' and 'The Beautiful Ones', he went so deep into the physical, into lust, into the maniacal excesses of our secret hearts, that he reached something shocking in its purity and truth and eternal in its revelation. And it's those glimpses of something beyond ordinary human articulation the people who truly know are talking about when they call him a genius. Because that's exactly what he was. Back then, anyway. Not an entertainer. Not a pop star. A genius.

But Prince was alsothe greatest pop star of the 1980s - what Bowie was to the 70s and, I would say, Bjork was to the 90s: a genius at the peak of their powers making their very best work while the world was paying most attention. His greatest artistic achievement was 'Sign O The Times', and 'Purple
Rain' sold the most, but his most perfect album in my estimation was 'Parade' - the breathtaking audacity of that non-stop stream of glorious songs woven together like the finest tapestry constructed out of light and sound. It hasn't aged a day. Like the best of his work, it still sounds as rapturous and intoxicating and indefinable as the day it first appeared.

My first thought when beginning writing this was simply to add a big stack of youtube clips of his greatest works and let them speak for him instead, but this sadly proved impossible: Prince is practically unique amongst pop stars in that there is just about none of his music anywhere on youtube or elsewhere on the internet. It's another one of those maddening control-freak parts of his later years, him setting his lawyers on any fan who uploaded his music to the net.

But here's what I would have played you, if I could have - my one-stop best-of Prince & The Revolution:

Sign 'O' The TimesAround The World In A DayCondition Of The HeartRaspberry BeretKiss (single version)I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man If I Was Your GirlfriendStrange RelationshipThe Beautiful OnesMountainsWhen Doves CryGirls & Boys/ Life Could Be So NicePurple Rain

But then that leaves out so much, I know, and I pity anyone who could make it to the grave without ever hearing 17 Days, Love or Money, When You Were Mine, Erotic City, La La La Hee Hee Hee, When We're Dancing Close and Slow, Feel U Up, Take Me With U, Adore, Automatic, Something In The Water (Does Not Compute), Let's Pretend We're Married, Controversy, Dirty Mind, I Wanna Be Your Lover, Little Red Corvette, Do Me Baby, Temptation, 1999, Alphabet Street, When 2R In Love, and Sometimes It Snows In April.

Then there are the lovely lesser songs like Cream, Sexy MF, It, The Other Side Of The Pillow, Willing and Able, Don't Play Me, The Truth, Can't Stop This Feeling I've Got, Still Would Stand All Time, Pussy Control, I Wanna Melt With U, Letitgo, The Holy River...

And all the songs he gave to others, like Nothing Compares 2U, The Screams of Passion, Manic Monday, everything by The Time and Sheila E. So many songs, in so short a time. It suddenly seems so obvious now how impossible it is to imagine him old. He was never meant to grow old, to wither and wrinkle and fade away.

But I'm glad I lived in his age and alone out of everyone I knew growing up, had that secret knowledge of a world of fantasy and imagination and bottomless desire. This has been me saying thank you for that. Thank you Prince.

Sometimes it snows in April
Sometimes I feel so bad
Sometimes I wish that life was never ending,
But all good things, they say, never last.

Monday, 21 March 2016

Karen Straughan on the endless pandering to women and girls by… well,
pretty much everyone, but in this specific instance, The Young Turks idiots.
Great stuff, well worth a look if you don't mind getting angry.

Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Great explanation by Sargon of Akkad of what an ideological lens is and how it distorts one's perception of the world:

“..To announce the adoption of an ideological ‘lens’ is to declare
openly that the author is going to provide you with a one-sided,
incomplete, dysfunctional piece of work that will serve to propagandize
the audience, instead of inform them, by deliberate omission of
otherwise relevant facts“

Tuesday, 2 February 2016

This is terribly depressing but a vital reminder of how toxic and
totalitarian feminism actually is, and what it in reality is achieving
in this world: not 'equality' but the hunting down and silencing of great men and anyone else who dares to point out their hatred and insanity.

Thursday, 14 January 2016

“Feminism: The advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of the equality of the sexes."

“Egalitarianism: The doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities.”

The two quotes above are sourced from the Oxford Dictionary. On the
face of it, feminism and egalitarianism appear to converge. Indeed, it
is not unusual to hear feminists appeal to this dictionary definition
whenever they are challenged. I will call this the “reasonable person”
defence, e.g., What reasonable person could possibly disagree? The point
being, they can't. Not if they want to remain reasonable in the eyes of
others,

But similarly, what reasonable person could disagree with
egalitarianism? Both premises are highly reasonable. But as numerous
studies and surveys have demonstrated, a majority of people support
egalitarian values but do not identify as feminists.[1] [2] [3] [4]
What's going on? Are these people confused, ignorant, or both?!

Neither.

It seems the non-feminist (not anti-feminist) egalitarian majority
either know or intuitively suspect a crucial difference between the goals
of egalitarianism and feminism. Unfortunately, looking to dictionary
definitions does not help us articulate what these differences are.

A visit to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
gives us a more detailed description of both concepts. The opening
preamble to the egalitarian chapter[5] dovetails nicely with the
dictionary definition above. The feminist chapter, however, quickly
diverges from the dictionary definition, running off into various
strands where the key theme is internal disagreement within feminism
about what feminism is. It takes just over 3,000 words before the term
patriarchy first appears but when it does, it is neither problematic nor
contested.

“Feminism, as liberation struggle, must exist apart from and as a
part of the larger struggle to eradicate domination in all its forms. We
must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological
foundation with racism
and other forms of group oppression, and that there is no hope that it
can be eradicated while these systems remain intact. This knowledge
should consistently inform the direction of feminist theory and
practice. (hooks 1989, 22)”[6]

Here is the first hint of what differentiates feminism from
egalitarianism. You will note there is no mention of equality by hooks;
the goal is “liberation” from “patriarchal domination.”

Ask a feminist what feminism means and you are likely to get one of
two responses. The "reasonable person" defence is one, while the other,
is what I will call the "atomistic dodge." This entails the feminist
stating that feminism is not a monolithic movement, its aims being too
complex to pin down[7]. This position personifies intersectional
feminism. Note how the descriptions contradict one another. It is easy
to get lost in this equivocal maze.

So, rather than trying to discern the differences between feminist
factions, I asked what they had in common. The results help us see the
difference between egalitarianism and feminism.

In 1963, the liberal feminist Betty Friedan published a book about a
“problem with no name.” Seven years later, radical feminists named it
“patriarchy." Patriarchy was conceived of as the underlying structure
which facilitated men's oppression of women; “a system characterized by
power, dominance, hierarchy and competition, a system that [could not] be reformed but only ripped out root and branch.”[8]

This moment marked a fundamental change in strategy as feminists
shifted from a liberal policy of achieving equality through reform, to a
radical strategy of trying to dismantle patriarchy. Around this time,
Friedan was unceremoniously kicked out of the organisation she had
founded because she wasn't radical enough[9]. Since this time,
patriarchy has remained central to all subsequent waves of feminism.
While it is true that the different factions of feminisms have slightly
different conceptions of patriarchy, they all agree on the following:

Patriarchy is a socially constructed phenomenon which enforces notions of sex and gender that equate to male supremacy and female inferiority[10] [11].

Patriarchy is the mechanism by which all men institutionally oppress all women[12].
All feminisms are united in the fight against patriarchy (if little else)[13].

But what is patriarchy? Does it even exist? There is a dearth of
research on feminist premises which values critical thinking over
critical theory, though this is starting to change.[14] Both the
existence and origin of patriarchy are assumed by feminists rather than
explored, yet the flawed, circular logic of the three premises above
represent the ideological bedrock of all feminisms—from radical to
intersectional—and social 'justice' activism today.

The feminist concept of patriarchy is embellished from the
anthropological observation that in many cultures men appear to hold
more social, economic and political 'power' compared to females.
Feminists assume men grasp for power and resources to dominate women
because they hate them (misogyny). My research suggests patriarchy is
vastly more complex than feminists have ever imagined and that women
have just as much influence in its structure and maintenance as men. As
Mary Wollstonecraft noted:

“Ladies are not afraid to drive in their own carriages to the doors of cunning men."[15]

Patriarchy is a system which can both oppress and liberate, both male and female. It is the human fitness landscape.

And here lies the rub for feminisms today. Heterosexual men and women
are attracted to one another precisely because of their stereotypical
sexual traits. In fact, they are not stereotypical, they are
archetypical. Humans are a sexually reproducing species. Men and women
have shaped one another physically and psychologically over millions of
years via the process of sexual selection. In turn, we create culture as
our fitness landscape. There is a simple dynamic to this: Men want
power and resources because women want men who have power and resources.

This isn't because women are selfish gold diggers or men shallow
aesthetes. Sexual dimorphism and the sexual division of labour are not
patriarchically imposed tyrannies. They are an elegant and pragmatic
solution for a species who have uniquely helpless infants with
unprecedentedly long childhoods. This dynamic between the sexes, of team
work and strong pair bonds, is one of the foundations of our success as
a species. The survival of offspring is at the centre of this—whether
we choose to have children or not. The sexes simply cannot be understood
except in light of one another and the reason we evolved to cooperate; offspring. It will continue to be so for as long as we remain human.

The feminist legacy of social constructionism and patriarchy theory
has taken the capricious, delightful and, yes, sometimes cruel battle of
the sexes and turned it into a war of attrition. The circular logic
also has feminism devouring itself from within.

This past year, one of the the most iconic women of the 20th
century, the radical feminist and intellectual, Germaine Greer, was
denied a platform to speak at a UK university.[16] Her crime? Greer does
not reject biology wholesale and, while she respects the egalitarian
rights of men who want to transition and live and love as a woman, she insists this doesn't actually make them biologically women; they remain trans-women.
For this she was stripped of the right to speak, verbally abused and
labelled a bigot. The middle class, socialist feminist Laurie Penny went
so far as to cast Greer in the same light as people who want to murder
homosexuals.

Why should women mind? In 2014 a trans-woman in the US was awarded
“working mother of the year” despite neither giving birth or being
primary carer to her children.[17] This year, in 2016, Caitlyn Jenner,
who has been living as a woman for a few months, will be awarded “woman
of the year” ahead of countless women of substance who have made
extraordinary accomplishments while facing actual selection pressures unique to their biological sex.
Trans-activists are lobbying for a change of language by midwives to
refer to people giving birth as “pregnant persons” not women.[18] At a
time when people debate whether a woman drinking the odd glass of wine
in pregnancy is child abuse, a trans-women took powerful (not socially constructed) hormones
to stimulate lactation[19]. A discussion of the nutritional value of
the milk extends to the trans-mother reporting the milk is thick and
creamy, which seems to identify it as something other than human breast
milk, which is highly dilute and low in fat.

Feminists frequently claim that we live in a rape culture, even though rape and all violent crime in
the West is in steady decline and rape prosecution statistics are on a
par with other crimes at over 50%.[20] [21] In the US there is a
feminist movement on college campuses to lower the threshold of proof in
rape prosecution trials. It is staggering to think these educated
people have forgotten terrible lessons within living memory; the bitter crop of strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

To balk at this is not hatred or phobia but healthy scepticism. We
are all equal before the law under egalitarianism. This is not the case
with feminism. It places ideology before people. Individual rights and
choices are “problematic”.[22] Women like myself who point out the
logical inconsistencies and totalitarian mission creep of feminism are
labelled anti-feminist and anti-woman; as if “feminist” and “woman” were
synonyms. They aren't. Feminists are identified by their politics,
not their sex or gender. They do not speak for women or the majority of
egalitarians in society; they speak only for themselves. The dictionary
definition of feminism is in serious need of a rewrite.

The egalitarian quest for equality is tangential to feminism. So...which are you?

Monday, 11 January 2016

I just found out and I’m somewhat in shock, as I didn’t see that
coming at all. Lemmy yes, but then I knew he was ill, and had looked
like death on legs for years. Bowie, I thought, would live another 15
years at least. Or possibly forever, the way gods are supposed to.

How do we mourn today?
How do we mark the passing of a great, illuminating soul? We change our
facebook profile picture. We post a one-sentence tweet. Then we go back
to our glowing screens. There is so much war and disaster and novelty
and death these days there’s no time for anything more. And besides, we all know another one will be coming along any moment now.

As
I get older I’m beginning to glimpse what it’s like to be old, with a
funeral every week of someone you once laughed with and loved. But it’s
not the people I slept with yet, it’s the heroes I grew up with, the
figures of beauty and genius I looked to as beacons of wonder and a
higher plain of existence, signposts to a richer, deeper world beyond
the narrow mundanity of family life and small town stagnation.

I
grew up before the internet, when there was no portal to the group mind
of the western world a finger motion away. To be an outsider finding
another human being sharing ANY of the same passions and ideas as
yourself was the rarest and most treasurable thing in the world, and you
could go your whole life without meeting one. Books were your safest
bet, if you were lucky enough to find one which told the truth. So for
someone to break through the carefully maintained inanity of the TV and
the Radio and use those mediums to bridge the gap between millions with something
challenging, alien, pure, heartfelt, dangerous and dissident was an
extraordinary and seemingly impossible act. I sometimes wonder if it’s actually
possible for people younger than me to appreciate just how hard it was
to make that happen, and what it therefore meant to those who were touched by it.

In
the age of reality TV and YouTube sensations, ‘fame’ doesn’t really
mean any of what it once did. We really should have another word for
karaoke contestants and celebrity chefs leaking their own sex tapes to
eke out one more week of recognition. You’re not truly famous in my book
unless people know your name a hundred years later. You’re certainly
not Great.

David Bowie was famous because David Bowie was
truly great: like The Beatles and The Stones before him, Bob Dylan and
Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, his songs are just as loved and played
and celebrated today as they ever were, almost 50 years on, and changed
pretty much everything that followed, both in music and popular culture.
I won’t even try to name all the lesser cul-de-sac acts that sprang up
in his wake, all the New Romantics and Goths, the Art-Rockers and Gender
Benders: none of them achieved anything comparable to their idol either
in breadth or popularity, and none of them would have - or could have -
existed without him.

What was his gift? What made him special? What did he do first, before anyone else?

Bowie
was the first magpie of rock n roll, the first to take on whole styles
of music as nothing more than colours for him to paint his own unique
creations with, and he did that all the way through his life, touring
whatever excited him in the moment from folk and rock and plastic soul
all the way through krautrock and ambient and jazz and drum&bass,
but turning all of them into simply ‘Bowie’. The songs Space Oddity, Ashes To Ashes and Hallo Spaceboy
are all thematically linked, all directly referring to the same character, though
each is more than a decade away from the one next to it, and in a
different genre of music. And every one of them a hit.

David
Bowie was the first rocker to explicitly make his life’s work the wearing of a
series of masks and personas - starting with Ziggy Stardust, he forced
the audience to step back from the ecstasy of the moment and see an
artificial creation - an ‘Actor’ before them playing a part the man behind the mask was writing. In doing so he deepened and expanded the vocabulary and possibilities of popular music, adding a knowing detachment and artificiality that would have been unimaginable in rock n roll before he came along. At a time when
Showaddywaddy, The Carpenters and The Bay City Rollers were his
competition in the charts, he was introducing high-art ideas from
experimental theatre and other mediums into rock music, such as
utilizing William S Burroughs’ “cut-up” method of writing novels for
writing lyrics.

If that wasn’t enough, he was also the first openly gay
pop star (even though he wasn’t really, perhaps just a little bi from
time to time, though no-one knew that then). In his unprecedented
androgyny, and still shocking antics onstage like simulating oral sex every night with his guitarist Mick Ronson back in the Ziggy days, he
kicked open the door for all the Boy George’s, Antony Hegarty’s and
Marilyn Manson’s to saunter through years later, though of course it goes
without saying none of them have created anything like the enormously
varied yet immediately recognizable body of work he put together, and
never will.

I don’t see my family all that often
but my mother often rings me up to tell me of the death of some person
from the past she swears I once knew, some distant aunt or uncle, some
old family friend whose house I once stayed at, long, long ago. And I
have to tell her over and over again I don’t remember who they are, I don’t know who she’s talking about. They mean nothing to me.

If
I was writing all this for a man I’d never met just because he was
someone I once saw on Top Of The Pops and on the cover of some
magazines, someone who made a few nice songs I hummed along with, that
would be a sad thing to confess. But if that person was a creature of flesh
and blood who somehow came to symbolize, for millions of people, boundless experimentation,
intelligence and curiosity in the dumbest of all art-forms, constant movement and
change, agelessness, uncompromising artistic vision and endless
possibilities, a land of pure thought above the mire we can visit every
time we put on one of his records... well then that would be the most
natural thing in the world.

The Librarian

“I have no doubt that, someday, the distortion of truth by the radical feminists of our time will be seen to have been the greatest intellectual crime of the second half of the twentieth century. At the present time, however, we still live under the aegis of that crime, and calling attention to it is an act of great moral courage” - Professor Howard S. Schwartz, of Oakland University in Michigan, USA, 2001